The Crimes
But how and who Pickton killed is still difficult to comprehensively establish even today because of both the method of his disposal and the judicial ban on reporting. The prosecution allege that he would lure his victims with money and drugs and cocaine traces were found in a lot of recovered tissue samples. After sex, he then strangled or shot his victims. (Bizarrely, a revolver was found with a dildo on its end, believed to have been an improvised silencer.) He would then feed their remains into his wood chipper, and serve the remains to his pigs.
As Harold Schechter points out in ‘The Serial Killers’, Pickton is not the first to use animals to dispose of evidence. Joe Ball, a 1920s bootlegger, used the bar he opened after Prohibition to lure waitresses and ex wives to his adjacent alligator pond. And as The Wineville Chicken Murders showed, (depicted in the Angelina Jolie/Clint Eastwood film, Changeling) a farm set up for the slaughter of animals, is also suitable for the slaughter of humans.
One of the few first hand witnesses to Pickton’s work was Lynn Ellingson. She lived briefly in a trailer on Pickton’s farm and said she walked in on a blood covered Pickton as a Ms Georgina Papin’s body dangled from a chain in the farm’s slaughterhouse. He disposed of Sereena Abotsway’s head, hands and feet in a bucket which he placed in a freezer where he also left bits of Andrea Joesbury’s body including her severed head. He disposed of other parts, such as the jawbones of Marnie Frey and Brenda Wolfe, and the head and hands of Mona Wilson in dustbins, manure and pig pens.When Pickton slaughtered the pigs that had been fed on slaughtered humans, he would sell on the pork.
